Systems and methods that code video are well known. The coding may involve transcoding that converts a compressed video from one format into another compressed format. The traditional approach is transcoding in the pixel domain referred to as the cascaded pixel domain approach. The cascaded pixel domain approach involves decoding the original video signal (decompressing it), performing the intermediate processing and then fully re-encoding the processed signal. The problem is that this type of transcoding is computationally expensive and very slow to perform which means that it is not possible to perform real-time transcoding.
The major areas of research in transcoding today focus on increasing the efficiency, i.e., decreasing the computational time. However, any gain in efficiency must have minimal impact on the quality of the transcoded video so that the viewer of the transcoded video does not perceive a degradation in video quality.
Currently, when a video is being streamed to a media player, the streaming is done using constant bit rate video streams. In the constant bit rate video streams, the bitrate, quantization, group of pixels and the regions of interest are constant. The problem is that a constant bit rate video requires a large amount of bandwidth to stream the video. It is desirable to provide a variable bit rate video streaming technique so that the bit rate of the stream can be adjusted depending on the available bandwidth of the link between the originator of the streaming video and recipient of the streaming video.
One current technique to provide variable bit rate streaming videos is to store multiple version of each piece of the same video wherein each version of each piece of the video has different characteristics such as bit rate, quantization, group of pixels or the regions of interest. Then, when a video is going to be streamed, a picker selects the appropriate pieces of the video with the appropriate characteristics to stream to the user. The problem with this approach is the massive amount of storage required to store all of the versions of each video. For example, a video that is 5 MB in size may require 200+MB of storage since all of the different versions of the different pieces of the video must be stored. This massive amount of storage makes the current technique unworkable for sites/companies that have a large number of videos to stream to users. Thus, it is desirable to provide an apparatus and method that overcomes the problems with the current techniques and it is to this end that the apparatus and method are directed.